Read 'Til You Drop

Lots going on in my non-writing life - all will be made clear in the future (good stuff, just still-private, and very-time-consuming stuff...)

I've been on a reading *tear* - lots and lots of good books, books of the caliber that I'm left wanting to stay up late reading, sit on my subway seat past my stop reading, ignore some of my favorite TV series reading - well, you get the idea.  Here's the year's tally so far (and just because I don't write anything about a particular book, don't take that as a gospel like-or-dislike - I'm just not feeling inspired to comment at the moment :-) ):

• MATES, DATES, AND INFLATABLE BRAS, by Cathy Hopkins.  A British YA novel, picked up as a study for a possible YA I'm thinking of writing.  I've been intrigued, reading contemporary British YA and British chick-lit, to find a *ton* of colloquialisms that I don't know.  Most are decipherable from the text, but these genres really get at the vernacular in a way that C.S. Lewis doesn't.
• THE PRINCESS DIARIES, by Meg Cabot.  Picked up for the same study.  I loved this book.  I'd heard so much about it, avoided seeing the Disney flick, thought that it was over-hyped, etc.  But I loved the character, loved her sense of humor, identified with the eye-rolling exasperation of adolescence, winced at the mistakes that I'd know enough not to make...  I actually laughed out loud a couple of times, which does not happen often with me.
• DARK HORSE, by Tami Hoag.
• THE TALISMAN BAG, by Karen Wester Newton.  No.  You haven't heard of Karen.  I read this book to blurb it for first-time author Karen Wester Newton, who happens to be in my once-and-possibly-future writing group.  Karen has landed an agent and is shopping around this well-drawn quick-read of a fantasy novel, which walks the fine line of YA and adult fiction, with romance, magic, religion, and more than a bit of fun.
• DOPPELGANGER, by Marie Brennan.  I'd been planning on reading this for a while - Marie and I frequent some of the same newsgroups some of the time.  While I started reading this novel is a hyper-critical mood (the opening sentence describes weather, and that is one of my personal pet peeve annoyances), I rapidly got sucked into the story.  The levels of magic and the carefully constructed social hierarchies illustrate that Marie is an anthropologist by training.  Even in this day and age, when I have so little time for reading, I intend to search out the sequel.
• UGLIES, by Scott Westerfeld.
• PRETTIES, by Scott Westerfeld.
• SPECIALS, by Scott Westerfeld.  I resisted reading the Westerfeld trilogy, because it's been so hyped on Boing Boing and elsewhere.  I didn't think that it could possibly be as good as all the cool kids said it was.  And you know what?  I was totally, completely wrong.  I LOVED this trilogy, with the passion that I loved books when I was a kid.  It reminded me of the John Christopher Tripod books and - in a rougher way - of Madeleine L'Engle's Meg Murray books.  It captures the angst of being fifteen/sixteen, and the weight of having a mission.  It asks overwhelmingly pertinent questions about who we are, as children, friends, citizens, people.